Gentry's polonium halos are a classic creationist argument. The claim that they somehow prove a young Earth was made by an untrained geologist and disproved 20 years ago, yet creationists still cite it as fact to this very day. (Source: Talk Origins)

Desperate minds seek desperate arguments

In
case you missed it, paleontologists, digging in South Africa
have discovered
the remains of a new species of hominid, Australopithecus
sediba,
buried in a cave. This little discovery is of tremendous
importance as anatomical evidence points to the species being a close
evolutionary relative to man, perhaps even a direct ancestor.

I
wrote a little story on the topic, analyzing the find, while briefly
touching on the pertinent creationism vs. modern evolutionary theory
debate that continues to rage to this day in America. I
expected the story to get a few comments. I never expected,
though that it would get over 575 comments, making it perhaps the
most commented on story in DailyTech's
history.

I think it's great that so many people are chiming in
and sharing their thoughts, and I think its a real sign of our site's
diversity and popularity. However, amidst those comments I saw
some that really bothered me as a person who has worked in the fields
of engineering and biochemistry in addition to my time here
at DailyTech.

Take
one reader, who writes:

Absolute
Scientific Proof the Evolutionary Theory is Dead.A story about
two friends from day one.

This
comment was rated up to a 3, so obviously some people agreed with
it. However, the site and "proof" it cites, from a
scientific perspective, are utterly worthless.

The site is full
of inaccurate and egregious jewels. Among them is the claim
that granite is called a "creation rock" by geologists and
can not be created on Earth today. This is patently false.
If such a term were ever used, it has no place in the field of modern
geology. Further, granite is to this very day being produced in
small quantities by metamorphism in amphibolite and granulite
terrains. There's nothing magical about it.

The other
"friend" that the site refers to is polonium, a radioactive
heavy element. Polonium makes halos in granite, which a
researcher named Robert V. Gentry claimed, starting in the 1980s, were
proof that the Earth was only 6,000 years old, as the literal reading
of The Bible claims. Gentry was by all reports a decent
researcher who was blinded by his obsession in proving creationism,
which led to him reaching far outside his field of expertise
(physics) into foreign fields like geology.

In this case, as
with most of his arguments for a "young Earth" his
"evidence" was shown to be completely wrong. There
was indeed uranium in the exact deposits Gentry sampled from, he just
failed to follow basic principles of geological sampling. Of course this is
understandable -- Gentry was no geologist. So his "proof"
was just another red herring.

The site also
implies that there's something "magical" about polonium
making its way into granite. Consider that silicon dioxide, the
primary component of granite melts at 1925 K, while 527 K. Thus
polonium would be molten and could easily make its way into cracks
and crevices in granite that had cooled to a solid. Again, the
claims are patently false and there's nothing magical or unknown
here.

Basic science invalidates many of the supposed "proof"
of creationism and a young Earth. Yet, while it's easy to
disprove a bad argument, its hard to kill one. As I mentioned,
here was an argument that was literally disproved over two decades
ago, but there's a site out there still using it as evidence and one
of our readers are referencing it as fact. And worse yet,
apparently some in our readership were misled enough that they rated
up the comment.

I don't have the time or energy to rebuke
every falsehood set forth by a handful of the commenters in that
thread, so I hope this was an informative example.

It's fine
to believe whatever you want when it comes to evolution. An all
powerful deity such as Xenu or the Christian God, could in theory
create a reality with evidence to the contrary of the creation
itself. Every single atom could have been set into motion
perfectly to deliver an elaborate, yet misleading picture. Yet
to scientists, we must interpret the picture that we see, and that
picture clearly points that evolution created the species we see
today and that the earth is billions of years old, not 6,000 years
old. Believe what you want, but try not to reference false
"facts" to justify your beliefs -- that's called spreading
misinformation, and it's disingenuous.

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